Should I upgrade from my 7600 to 8600gt???

Hi I currently have a Toshiba P100 with the 7600 256mb gpu. I have recently bought Crysis and was PLEASANTLY surprised how well it plays on my laptop. I have the resolution at just under 1280x800.(its the next res down from that...1166x657 or something) and have all settings at medium except for Shaders which is set at low. It plays perfectly smooth and the fps always stays around 30fps+.. But I am somewhat disappointed that I cant set shaders to Medium as the performance hit is HUGE!!!.. And its such a pitty coz the game looks MUCH BETTER when the shaders are set to Medium!..
Even when I sacrifice resolution and put it to 1024x768 and have set some of the other settings to low, the performance is still crappy. (Barely 20fps)

Well I have looked at the new Toshiba X205 with the 8600gt and am considering selling my laptop and maybe getting the X205.. but how much of a performance increase will I get? I also saw some other graphic configerations of the X205 with a 8700gt and a 8600gtx2 SLI config... What should I do? Also Bioshock runs even worse that Crysis and the fps go as low as 4-5fps at some points in the game, no matter what setting im on.. My drivers are update as well and are the 169.04 version..

 

7600 will roughly do the same performance as 8600m, so if that is your only concern then keep your current notebook and save up money to get one with 8800m next year. 8600m sli performs a little better than a 7950gtx so if you want to go for the sli toshiba it would let you play games on pretty high settings. Crysis does not support Sli yet though so you might not get any boost from SLi. 8700m will do fairly well and since it is mxmIII it is upgradeable as well.

 

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unless i missed something while i was gone, no it doesn't

 

im pretty sure on lower res 8600m on sli supporting games would perform on par with 7950....one 8700m does better than 7950 on lower res and 8700 is just overclocked version of 8600m....so add about 25% boost to 8600m sli and it should do just as well if not a teensy weensy better on resolutions lower than 1600 x xxxx

 

are u sure about that?

 

i have a 7600 notebook and my brother has the Velocity Micro C90 Ultra...and just performance wise on oblivion for example, the settings were not too different...oblivion is mostly just shader heavy though so on other games like crysis (where FPS is more important) 8600m might fare better.

 

Ive had both the 7600 and now currently the 8600 GT. The 8600 fares much much better in gameplay and in 3d marks.

 

Yeah I have to say I was confused when you said that the 8600M should preform around the same as the 7600.. I would think it is at least 25% faster!.. ANd it does far better in 3d Mark tests...

 

hmm...i might need to check my brother's 8600 then...maybe it was on power save mode.

 

I believe the previous gen to current gen comparisons are:
Go 7600/MR X1600 ~ 8400M GT
Go 7700 ~ 8600M GS
Go 7900GS ~ 8600M GT

So yes, there is a difference and it will be noticable. I'm not sure if it's more than 25% as someone mentioned, but it'll be more than 15% for sure since the 8600 series drivers should be up to par now. (Then there are the DDR2 vs DDR3 debates).

 

Why not just wait for an 8800m?

I can play Crysis at low res with all settings at medium and an OK framerate (around 25FPS). It'd be REALLY nice to just set it all to high and forget about it with an 8800m.

Also, my performance is slightly above average, due to the fact that my 8600m is the MBP model (GDDR3).

 

The 8600M-GT SLI is a good setup, and in games with good support for SLI you'll see performance in the range of an X1800XT or a Go7800GTX, but still below a single Go7950GTX.

The 8600M-GT should kill the Go7600 in Oblivion, I'd have your brother check his setup again. In all modern, shader-intensive games such as Oblivion, Bioshock, Crysis, etc. the 8600M-GT will be anywhere from 25% to 50% better than the Go7600 (assuming there isn't another bottleneck like insufficient RAM or CPU power).

The only slight correction I would make to your chart is that the 8600M-GT is definitively below the Go7900GS. In terms of power alone, it'd be better to say it's the rough equivalent of a Go7800.

 

My friend has a Compal with an 8600 GT and crysis runs way better on my go 7900 gs compared to his. I can run it with medium shaders and the rest med/high with 20+ fps while he barely tops 10fps on medium shaders. But, like some have said before, there wont be much of a jump from a 7600 -> 8600 gt but you will notice the difference. I wouldnt recommend it and would rather you go for an 8700m or an 8800m whenever they come out and your down to pay the price.

 

whoa' how'd you get 30 fps with mostly med settings in crysis? my 7600 playing demo is only 15 FPS on ALL LOW settings... maybe my drivers are bad , 7.15.11.134 ?!~ when i try to use the drivers from laptop2go it says my drivers are better already... :O

 

Always over 30 fps... not a chance with medium settings and that resolution even if shaders were low.

This sounds a lot closer to the truth.

 

You have fairly old drivers, get the 169.04 version from LaptopVideo2Go.

 

k.. i got the new drivers.....

i get 10 fps in forest.. 15 fps in woods... 25 fps lookin at the blue sky in crysis demo.. cools

 

on all low settinGS*!

 

Well I don't know if it is just my setup or drivers, but on an 8600m gt I get performance similar to your 7600. at 10x7 all medium the game is quite laggy, even in some indoor scenes. I use the 169.04 drivers. Are there any drivers out there that give better performance?